Synology is a Taiwanese company that specializes in hardware and software for network attached storage. It's not particularly known as a security company, but with the American government publicly demanding access to more or less all data on the planet, and other countries and less polite entities taking it without asking, the market is ripe to sell security products to wary consumers. Hence MailPlus, yet another secure and encrypted email system, this time independently hosted from a customer's Synology-branded NAS hardware.

Since the Snowden leaks began back in 2013, there has been a justifiable increase in public scrutiny of the US federal government's attitudes towards surveillance and information access. So when President Obama voiced the opinion that encrypted files should be accessible to law enforcement (presumably via some kind of backdoor or exclusive decryption method), privacy advocates joined security experts in a nationwide groan. Thankfully the administration seems to have changed its tune nine months later.

If you've heard about the Turing phone, you're probably either extremely interested or extremely indifferent. (Is it possible to be indifferent to an extreme degree? Anyway.) The somewhat bombastic company has been showing off a device with a unique design and lofty claims of being "unhackable." It's more than vaporware, though - working prototypes have been shown at trade events, and now Turing is taking phone reservations via its website.

That's a very carefully chosen word, "reservations" - not pre-orders. This is because the Turing isn't actually asking for any money upfront. No, entering your contact information after selecting colors (black and purple, "Beowulf," red and blue, "Pharoh," or white and red, "Cardinal") and storage capacity (16GB for $610, 64GB for $740, or 128GB for $870) is more or less a statement of interest than any commitment to buy the phone on your part.

Forget about GPS issues, it looks like ASUS has a bigger problem on its hand with the Transformer Prime: a locked/encrypted bootloader. Like with other devices, as soon as the development community found out about this, there were some rather irritated people. The typical backlash against the company has now started on popular social networking sites, along with a petition that has managed to get over 200 signatures in just a few hours.

This is definitely not the type of publicity that ASUS wants surrounding the world's first quad-core tablet, and users are hoping that the Taiwanese manufacturer will eventually reverse its decision and open the device.

If you were ever wondering what bootloader encryption, signing, and locking actually meant, this post is for you.

My name is Ivo, and recently I posted this write-up on Reddit (check out the Android subreddit while you’re there!). The post gained quite a bit of traction, and to spread the word further, I'm now posting it here at Android Police. I hope it helps out those of you who are confused.

It’s necessary, if you want to talk about these issues, to get some cryptic terms out of the way, so we actually know what we’re talking about! If you want to find out more about these topics, just click on through to their respective Wikipedia articles.

Update: If you've somehow inexplicably ended up at this article, please note, HTC has since announced the 3D will be unlocked (at some point) and their future policy is to have unlocked bootloaders on all devices.

It seems HTC has finally caved to what are likely the security demands of wireless carriers with its newest phones, and is locking down its handsets Moto-style. Latest case in point: the EVO 3D - which sports the same sort of security we found on the Sensation earlier this month. In other words, good luck cracking into this thing.

Before we get any further, there seems to be some confusion on what exactly is "locked down." Let's clear that up: the bootloader image itself is not encrypted.

This morning, however, we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel for devices that have been uncracked for many months - namely, Motorola Milestone and possibly Droid X, Droid 2, Charm, and other devices from the Sholes family (this, apparently, does not include the Atrix 4G).

AT&T users, rejoice! Brief Mobile has been informed that user DesignGears, along with Getaphixx, has rooted the Motorola Atrix before its official release.

AT&T is notorious for restricting its users to only Market apps. Through rooting, however, non-Market apps can run via sideloading. These privileges also provide an easy way to free users of the bloated social-networking service MOTOBLUR and disable many other unnecessary applications.